Businesses and other organizations often store information associated with customers or other individuals or entities in order to better serve those customers or for some other purpose. For example, an e-commerce platform may store a customer's name and mailing address for shipping products to the customer, account name and password to enable a customer to login to an e-commerce website or for other services, age, and/or an order history. Some e-commerce platforms may use the customer information in order to provide better and more customized service such as suggesting other products that the customer may be interested in. Other types of platforms (e.g., social media platforms, financial services platforms, etc.) may store user profile information, activity information on the platform or other platforms, or other information.
However, in many cases, the information collected may be incomplete or fragmented. For example, the e-commerce platform in the example above may receive a call from customer from a phone number. Although the e-commerce platform has the customer's phone number, it is unable to retrieve other information associated with the customer (e.g., the customer name, mailing address, or order history) because the e-commerce platform does not have the customer's phone number in the customer record. Even though the e-commerce platform has access to the phone number and other customer information, the e-commerce platform is unable to leverage the customer information because the customer information is fragmented and there is no association between the phone number and the rest of the customer information.
The fragmentation of customer information may lead to a degraded level of service and/or an increase the time and effort needed to provide services to customers, which increases costs to the business. For example, instead of being able to automatically retrieve the customer record, a customer service representative of the e-commerce platform may need to request additional information from the customer (e.g., an account name, an order number, etc.) in order to identify the customer record and retrieve it.